Article from Ars Technica, discussing the move to digital archiving. Personally, I would love it if people would stop sending me dead trees and just give me an option for online subscriptions for my journals…

Last week, the head of the US branch of Oxford University Press noted an event that was striking, if unsurprising. When grading an assigned paper, a Columbia University professor found that the majority of his students had cited an obscure work of literary criticism that was roughly a century old. The reason? Because the work was in Google Book Search, while much other (more recent) work was not.

The relative invisibility of offline information has an impact on almost all areas of life, but it’s felt especially acutely in the academic world, where work builds on the existing body of knowledge. Getting all of that dead-tree information onto the Internet (or into archives like J-Stor) would be of tremendous utility to scholars and students, but convenience isn’t the only reason for digital distribution of academic work. A recent decision by a prominent academic publisher to switch to digital-only distribution was apparently motivated by simple economics: print no longer made financial sense.